


intermarginal

by renaissance



Series: fandom weekly ficlets [2]
Category: The Spy Who Came in from the Cold - John Le Carré
Genre: F/M, Gap Filler, Introspection
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-01-17
Updated: 2019-01-17
Packaged: 2019-10-11 11:45:27
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 493
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/17446349
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/renaissance/pseuds/renaissance
Summary: Liz, after Alec, before the storm.





	intermarginal

**Author's Note:**

> for [fandom weekly](https://fandomweekly.dreamwidth.org/) prompt #002: heartbreak + under 500 words. this ficlet came in at second place in the voting round!
> 
> fun fact, i first read this book for high school, a whole five hundred years ago, and promptly forgot... most of it. i'm halfway through a reread now and liz hit me as the perfect character for the heartbreak prompt. this is the first time i've written fic without technically having finished the canon. please be merciful :P

London winter treats her roughly. When it rains she gets wet, on the way to work, on the way to party meetings. When it isn’t raining her skin is dry and she finds it hard to sleep without the steady sound on her windowpane. She can’t afford an umbrella or a new tin of hand cream from the pharmacy. At night she dreams of spring, new leaves viridescent on the trees that line her street, flowers budding in the planters that the people across the road so carefully look after.

There is an absence in her life, an article cut out of the paper and stuck on the refrigerator, only to be found missing a month later though she could have sworn she never threw it away. Perhaps it had never been there in the first place. This is what it’s like with Alec gone. She didn’t know him for long, but she knew him thoroughly. A man like him, who conversed in riddles and kept more secrets than he took breaths, was not to be _known_ , so to speak, but she had done so admirably, she assured herself. He had opened his door to her when he had no obligation to even look in her direction. She had loved him, for as long as he’d been there; a glint of white-hot light against the window for a split-second while the sun was at just the right angle.

Now there’s nothing but dull glass, covered in the layer of grime that covers everything in a city like this.

She’s long since given up on finding him. He clearly doesn’t want to be found. She thinks this with some fondness and wonders madly what’s driven her to feel such intense bursts of romance for a man fickle as the wind and never all that warm. She has certainly never been in love so comprehensively before, and it is because she is so in love, she supposes, that her heart is in so many pieces.

On evenings, the sort when they would dine together, she sits alone at her table and imagines him sitting across from her, listening politely while she talks of nothing in particular. It is on one such evening that she sees a car too nice for this area pull up outside her block of flats. She sees it through the grime on the windowpane and she thinks for one manic moment that it could be Alec—and why couldn’t it be? She can never say for certain whether he’ll come back to her, but that does not stop her from expecting him to reappear in her life, all smudged ink on old yellowing paper and worn familiarity.

Then she sees two men step out of the car. Though Alec is long gone from her life, she knows they’re here for him. It is the closest she will come to seeing him again for god knows how long. She lets them in.


End file.
